By a Different Star
by meijing
Summary: The annual holiday Taito, where two boys help each other survive a horrible war and return to each other, despite all odds and with the help of a star. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

By a Different Star

by meijing

Ahh…the annual Christmas fic that lets everyone know that I haven't dropped off the face of the planet. (Kinda. This is majorly late, I know. Blame it on exams—er, the Grinch).

This year's fic is an AU, in which I've switched the origins (German and Roma, respectively) and used the shortened names of Yamato and Taichi (Matt and Tai) for the general purposes of the storyline. Such will be clarified as the story progresses. Oh look—it's a reindeer! It's Santa! No—it's a _flamingly gay yuletide Taichi/Yamato! _Oh come, all ye slash fans, joyful and addicted…

Ahem. Set in 1951, this story is of two boys who helped each other survive a terrible war, and how they eventually find each other despite all odds. The chapters are told from Danika's POV (original character).

_Disclaimer: I don't own Dejimon Adobencha and am making no profit from this fiction whatsoever, nor do I claim to be a PhD specialist in the Holocaust. _But I do own a lot of DVDs and books about both…

* * *

Warsaw bustled with people more than six years after the horrifying war that everyone hoped to forget—at least, they hoped to forget how much sin and hatred a human heart could hold…no one ever wished to forget the victims. Remembrance was key, they believed—the key to moving on and letting the souls of the dead rest in a beautiful peace everyone so achingly wanted.

At the naïve age of 14, I knew nothing of war and hatred and destruction. My family had escaped to America in 1938 when my Slovak grandmother "had a feeling" that something evil was brewing in Europe after the horror of _Kristallnacht_. The great melting-pot could never replace home, so in 1950 we moved back to Poland where "we had roots." My grandmother died shortly after, leaving my mother at a loss for a babysitter when it came to me and my nine year old brother, Casmir. (I had tried several times to convince her that I was without a doubt old enough to watch the both of us, but she'd never listened).

She found a solution in our neighbor, a man named Matt (not Mr. Weiss, he sometimes reminded us; that made him feel old). He couldn't have been older than 26 or so, but something in his eyes was much, much older—in other words, I knew that he had a grand story to tell. As much as I wanted to find out, my mother took care to remind me not to.

"Now my dear star," she'd always say before we'd leave for school (my name means "star in the morning" and comes from my Grandmother's homeland), "be good when you go over to Matt's house. Don't track in any mud—you know he's a bachelor and it's hard to find a good maid these days. Go there right after school—no trips to the theatre! Do what he asks of you. And for goodness sakes, don't ask him about the war!" She'd then usher us out of the door and wait for our father to drive her to her job at the publishing company.

Things changed in the icy December of 1951. School had been let out for the holidays a week early because of the ice storms, but our mother still trudged to work, leaving us with Matt. After the usual entertainment subsided (my mother didn't allow Matt to let us watch too much television, it was too cold and rainy to go outside, we'd read all our books, the radio was boring), my brother and I resorted to board games, a bad idea from the start.

"Cas, stop cheating!"

"I'm not cheating!" He avoided my gaze in the way I knew meant that he was lying.

"Oh yeah? Then how'd your knight end up so far along? He decided to take a walk while I went to get some water?"

"Like this!" he cried, and chucked the glass figure at me. I threw my bishop at him, which started all-out war. Just as Casmir's king catapulted in my direction, I heard Matt's usual groan.

"Can't you guys find something else to do other than destroy my house?!" He deftly caught the figure and placed it back on the chess board.

"It's her fault!" cried Casmir. Traitor.

"Is not! Act your age, Casmir!"

"I am! You act yours!" I was going to retort when Matt put a hand on my shoulder.

"Hey, hey, hey—let's make a deal. If you two can be civil for at least five minutes, we'll…go on an adventure. Yeah, an adventure."

This definitely caught Casmir's nine-year-old attention. "Where?" Matt hesitated as he wracked his brain to fill the gaps.

"The attic."

"What! There's nothing in attics but smelly old clothes and bats." Casmir pouted and stuck out his tongue. His brown hair was still tousled from the "battle."

"Yeah, that may be true. But there's a story in everyone's house. Find something interesting and I'll tell you the story behind it." Matt rolled up the sleeves of his gray sweater. "So, what's it going to be? Are you coming or not?" Casmir looked over at me.

"_I _am! _I'm _not afraid to go," I said, playing along. I knew that Cas was probably right, but it would be interesting to see what Matt had planned. Besides, Matt never told us anything about himself, save for things about his university studies and the kinds of music he loved.

Minutes later we were all armed with flashlights and on our way through half-lit staircases. The dust and fading sunlight created an eerie glow on our faces, and Casmir took every opportunity to make faces at me. The attic door opened with an obstinate groan and spiders scurried out of our way. Matt flipped on a light and led us further into the room, warning us to watch our steps. Casmir went straight for the boxes of old games and toys, while I dug through piles of old journals (his father's—he'd passed away years ago), military memoirs (his grandfather's, from the first World War), and comic books (some in English, some French, some German). The sun began to sink below the window and I still hadn't found anything that would tell me more about our hauntingly sad neighbor.

A well-wrapped faded, threadbare jacket fell out of a box and startled me. "Hey, what's this?" Casmir looked up from Matt's collection of airplanes and Matt blanched. There was a black triangle sewn on the front.

"It's—It's just—nothing. Put it back. It's nothing." I had never seen him so lost and somehow feeble, like Cas whenever he got separated from us in town.

"Wait—didn't people have to wear these during _ha-shoah­—_the Holocaust? Because Hitler said so and all?" Matt took the jacket from me and held it gently in his fingers. He didn't say a word.

"Oh yeah! Palti's uncle had a yellow triangle because he's Jewish and he says that those filthy Germans—"

"Casmir!" I warned. Matt had begun to look a little seasick. Or heartsick, maybe.

"They're not all 'filthy Germans,' you know," Matt said quietly. "You can't judge a whole race like that." Casmir mumbled an apology, embarrassed, and Matt sighed and ran his fingers over the fabric. "After all, I am one of them." He sat on one of the sturdier boxes and Cas and I settled on the floor around him.

"You don't have to tell us anything about it if you don't want to." Casmir made a whiny grunt beside me so I elbowed him. A sad smile broke out on Matt's face, and definitely didn't belong there.

"He and I had to wear these in the camps. The black triangle means 'gypsy, or asocial.' It was given to a large group of people just because the Nazis needed ways to classify them all. I had to wear a red triangle, for 'political prisoners.'"

"He? Who? Your brother?" Casmir twirled the propellers of the airplane.

"No, my…friend. My closest friend." There was a long silence, and I almost thought that he wouldn't continue. To my surprise, he crossed his long legs on top of the box and began his story.


	2. Chapter 2

By a Different Star

Chapter II

Some important historical points included in the storyline:

-_Kristallnacht_ is the name given to the 1938 murder of Jewish people and destruction of Jewish shops by the rising Nazi government.

-The Death Marches were the results of the Nazi fear of a loss of power and a hasty cover-up of the death camps when they began to fear losing the war. Basically, the people held in the concentration camps were lead miles across the countryside and shot or left for dead in the snow.

* * *

"They called my father 'The Ruined German.' After _Kristallnacht_, he left his position at the capital because he didn't agree with Hitler's plans for _die Relnigung_—'the cleaning,' the Nazi leaders called it. He tried to get as far as possible from the government, first by leaving his job and then by moving us out of the country. We couldn't all leave at the same time, so first my mother and my brother took a train to "visit some family" in Switzerland.

This was in 1939, and my father waited until late 1941 for us to leave. They almost caught us in Prague, so we hid around in small cities for three years. In April 1944 our neighbors traded my father's life for their own safety. They claimed my father was a communist, gave us red triangles to wear on our clothes, and took us to Magdanek, one of the death camps.

They shaved our heads and separated us into worker groups. I didn't see my father for months, and I didn't find out until the Allies set me free that they had killed him in the gas chambers soon after we arrived." He paused and cleared his throat.

"I'll spare the both of you all the horrors that the Nazis did to us all. I suppose that one day our country will have to courage to put it all in the history books, and by then you'll be old enough." Casmir groaned, making Matt smile.

"They didn't give us nearly enough food, and when January rolled around I started to get too sick to work—which usually meant the end for any of the prisoners. I suppose that the only reason they kept me for so long was because of my hair and eye color." He ran his hands through his shoulder-length blond locks and shrugged, an ashamed expression clouding his blue eyes. "It's just a guess, anyhow."

"My friend, Tai, the only friend I had at camp, is the real reason I'm still here. He took the blame for me and earned several beatings for it. When the worst came along, the Nazis lined us all up for the Death Marches to try to escape the approaching Allies. I stumbled in the lines and Tai caught me. The guard saw him and ordered him into the woods with some random people they'd selected to get rid of. Tai slipped me his jacket before he left, and I've kept it up here ever since."

Casmir looked up. "So what happened to him?" He almost looked afraid of the answer.

"The soldiers made the lines move and I heard gunshots in the woods where they'd led the others. I never saw him again." He ended his story in an almost whisper and stared at the jacket in his hands.

"Sorry guys, that wasn't the best story for a rainy afternoon. Don't let it get you down; nothing like that will happen ever again." He ruffled Casmir's hair, who was distracting his sadness with the airplane. "Hey, how about I let you keep that." Cas jumped up, excited.

"Really?" Matt nodded. "Look Danika—I'm the good guys, coming to save Matt!" This was followed by general airplane and gun noises, and finally out of the attic and down the stairs, out of sight. I waited until I heard him banging around downstairs to speak again.

"Tai…wasn't just a friend was he?" There had been something in the way he said the name, some spark in his eyes that I'd never seen before that made me wonder. Matt looked at me, unsure of what to say. "I mean—I think it's beautiful if—I know that the church calls it deviant behavior and what they say about it in the Americas and all, but…." I stammered out, not quite as eloquent as I'd wanted to be.

"It's okay. Yes, he was that and a thousand times more, but I never got to tell him that. Sounds like a cheap romance novel, doesn't it?" The smile that followed was tainted with sadness, like all the other ones I'd seen.

"He was Roma—a gypsy, as the soldiers called them. The first time I saw him he warned me to stay away—he could be a murderer, or a prostitute. The black triangle could have meant any of that. Somehow in all the desperation he found things like that to say to make me laugh; from then on, for the most part we were inseparable. They'd transferred his family from Treblinka, and his sister had died along the way. She was only 16, and he was 20, like me. Even still he had a light in his eyes, like hope or courage or _something_ great had hidden itself there so that no one could take it away.

He lost so much more weight than I did, especially after I got sick. I had only known him for months, but he did little things for me like wrap me in his blankets and give me any extra food he'd weasled out of the guards. Our cabins, I guess you'd call them, had holes in the ceiling, so whenever we'd go to sleep at night he'd make jokes about the spectacular view. I held him in return the few times I caught him crying, just to try to repay him for all he'd done for me.

The last night I saw him, when we were separated in the death marches, he held me in his arms in the snow and gestured to the sky. He promised that if I just held on we'd meet again, by a different star. They took him away and when I was set free I moved here."

The story ended in silence again, and I'd never felt at such a loss for anything, anything at all, to say to make it better. The doorbell rang, and he helped me up and down the stairs.

My mother greeted us at the door, smiling but with her "I'm in a hurry I've got something important to do" face. "Thanks so much again. I hope they weren't too much trouble today."

"No, not at all." (He _always_ said that, no matter how much destruction we'd caused). He smiled a false smile that my mother didn't quite ever catch, that always made me laugh, but not this time. I was upset that I'd finally learned about him, but in the saddest way possible. That, and this was the first time I'd heard him talk so much. I felt like I needed to find a way to make things better.

As we were leaving, I hugged him close and thanked him for the story. He hugged me back and waved in response to our calls of, "See you tomorrow!"

The bags my mother carried smelled of peppermint and spices. She must have been planning to bake a cake. She turned to as we headed down the stairs. "Now kids, you have to be on your best behavior for the next couple of days. We have a special guest who'll be staying at our house."

"Please not Aunt Kam!" Casmir blurted out, earning another jab in the ribs from me. Aunt Kamilia would have scared the Khans out of China, she was so scary. She was my mother's sister, but something went wrong while she was born (martians in the hospital, Cas thought) because she didn't have one drop of kindness in her body, and she had all these weird recipes we were forced to eat when she came over.

My mother sighed, signaling that she wasn't in the mood. "No, and don't say bad things about your aunt." The other people of the city passed us by in the evening rush. "It's actually a man that Mr. Adelman—you remember, my boss at the publishing company—wanted to talk to about publishing some of his work. He's written about the war; he was prisoner at one of the camps, and we want some of his first hand commentary to perhaps use in some of the textbooks."

"Do you think he'll let you?" I wondered.

"Mr. Adelman hopes so. If not, it's still valuable to know, printed or not. Mr. Adelman asked me to find a good hotel for him, but I felt that he'd be more comfortable here." She turned the key and opened our front door. The house was dark; our father wasn't home yet. My mother was just a secretary, and she was almost always at Matt's door to pick us up by 5:45; my father, on the other hand, drove to his office at the banker's every day and didn't get home until dinnertime. "Go wash up and get ready for dinner, both of you. Mr. Kostka will be here soon."

By the time I put my shoes and books away the doorbell rang. "I'll get it!" I called to my mom. I opened the door, and there stood a man about Matt's age with the most impossible hair that I'd ever seen—it would have puzzled Einstein, even. It was _large,_ to say the least, and a million shades of brown at once. He smiled at me, but there was something sad behind his eyes, which were the same color as his hair.

"Hi, I'm Mr. Kostka, but you can call me Tai. Is your mother home?"


	3. Chapter 3

By a Different Star

Chapter III

Something as big as a bullfrog leapt into my throat. The stranger at my door was the man who'd been through the _ha-shoah._ He was about Matt's age. He'd told me to call him Tai. It was an impossible coincidence, and my science teacher said there was no such thing as coincidences. I froze, and didn't even feel my mother come up behind me.

"Mr. Kostka, good evening! Good to see you again. This is my daughter, Danika." He nodded at me and smiled wider.

"Seems like I've startled her."

"Oh, nonsense. You know how odd children are. Do, come in! I'll show you to the guest room." He stooped to pick up his bags and followed my mother into the living room, leaving me standing in the doorway.

"It can't be. There's no way. No way at all," I murmured. I bit of hysterical laughter burst past the bullfrog in my throat. I mechanically made my way into the living room and worried the frays on my sleeve. "It's not even the first day of Hanukkah or Christmas or anything. Isn't there a specific day for miracles? But it is December."

"Why are you talking to yourself, Danika?" Casmir asked. "You're loony."

"It's him!"

"Who? The writer guy?"

"Yes!"

Casmir scratched his brown hair and paused. "So? It's not like mom's never invited anyone over before."

"No—it's him! Tai! Matt's friend from the war!" Casmir's eyes grew larger than I'd ever seen them grow before.

"Fibber!"

"Not! Come see!" We dashed up the stairs to the guest room, passing my mother on the way.

"Don't run up the stairs," she said automatically. Her words didn't register to me; all I could think of was the man in the guest room. Casmir and I burst into his room, making Tai drop the things he'd been holding. Words flew out of my mouth without my control.

"Hi again I'm sorry that we didn't knock but I need to ask you something if you don't mind about the war because we have a friend who baby-sits us and he was captured too and I was wondering what exactly your story is because I might know who you are!" I gasped and felt my face growing hot.

"Slow down, slow down!" he laughed, though I could tell he was a bit freaked out. "What was that again?"

I tried to think of the most important questions. "Which camps were you taken to?"

"Treblinka and then Magdanek."

"Do you have a sister?"

"Yes, but she passed away. On the way to Magdanek, actually." His face fell. I could tell that he'd been through these questions hundreds of times before.

"What happened to you—how did you escape?"

"The soldiers led us away from Magdanek, and they took me into the woods to kill me. Just then gunfire from the Allies exploded through the forest, and I was shot. I passed out, and when I woke up I was safe again. Aren't you too young to be asking about all this?"

My fingers were shaking on the doorknob by then. I could have hopped all the way to the moon, but I settled for crushing him in a hug. He returned it awkwardly. "You have to come with me! I know someone you know from the camp!"

To my dismay, he shook his head. "They told me that most of the people I knew were killed or have moved far away from here." He stepped away, but Casmir and I grabbed his hands. I just had to be the star that brought them together, even if I got grounded for it.

"You have to come!" We yelled. We dragged him out of his room and down the stairs, past my mother (who fortunately had her back turned to us). "We're showing Mr. Kostka the flower garden, mom!" We dashed out the door before she could protest and skipped up the stair to Matt's front door. I banged on it, almost bruising my hand.

"Calm down—Danika? What's the matter?" He glanced at me, worried.

"It's Tai! We've found him!" For a minute I thought that I had made a fatal mistake, and had just wasted my time. Matt just stood there, staring into Tai's eyes, and Tai did the same. Minutes passed with none of us saying a word. Matt made some kind of strangled noise in the back of his throat and fell into Tai's outstretched arms.

"This is impossible," he murmured, his face buried in Tai's shoulder. "I heard them shoot you. I thought that you were dead." Tai kissed his forehead. Cas and I were rooted to the spot, not needing to stay but not wanting to leave. They broke apart and Matt ushered him inside for some much needed catching up. He turned and flashed me the most brilliant smile, the one I'd always knew he had hidden inside somewhere. Just as I was shutting the door, I saw their faces inching closer for a kiss and giggled.

"What? What's so funny?"

"Nothing, Cas. Nothing at all."

* * *

What? What do you mean that I have this strange inability to write a sad, realistic, or non-schmoompy holiday story? I have no idea what you're talking about.

; Merry Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice!


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